A quarter-century after Terence McKenna’s death, his daughter Klea McKenna is building the archive his legacy deserves — and confronting a storage unit she hadn’t opened in 25 years.
The late Terence McKenna isn’t easy to categorise. A lecturer, author, ethnobotanist, philosopher and High Times cover alumnus, McKenna was a defining voice of the psychedelic community through the ’80s and ’90s. He popularised ideas like DMT elves and the Stoned Ape Theory, and preached the Heroic Dose — five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness — to anyone willing to listen.
A quarter-century after his passing, videos of his lectures continue to amass millions of views. Now his daughter Klea McKenna, a visual artist based in San Francisco, is stewarding that legacy by building an archive of his intellectual work and life story through recordings, photos, journals, manuscripts, lecture notes and personal letters. We sat down with her to talk about grief, memory, mushrooms and what it actually meant to grow up as Terence McKenna’s kid.
Who is Klea McKenna?
I’m a visual artist and I also write and teach. My primary medium for the last 17 years has been cameraless photography, making images through light sensitivity, but without a camera, a lens, or a negative. I stretch the photographic medium to record touch and pressure, to capture something that feels more like subjective experience and less like the objective witnessing for which photography was invented.
Artist Klea McKenna in the newly formed Lux Natura archive of Terence McKenna’s life and work. Photo by Airyka Rockefeller, 2026.
What inspired you to begin archiving your dad’s work?
My dad died when I was 19, and it had been a fairly traumatic decade leading up to that. At the time, I walked away from everything. I was looking to build …
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Author: Louis O’Neill / High Times
